Brief Description:
Oaxaca, owes its fame to the beauty and harmony of its architecture, the richness of its cultural traditions, the wide variety of its typical foods, and its soft temperate climate, spring-like throughout the year. Its name comes from Huaxyácal (the apex of the guajes, a variety of acacia, of Huaxín, guajes, and yacatl, summit). The Aztecs applied the name to the summit where they built a fortress in 1486. At arrival, the Spaniards founded, next to the old fort, the new Villa de Antequera, and a few years later, returned to the old Aztec fortress to erect, in the same guaje summit, a city that, in 1529 would be founded, built, and peopled as Villa de Oaxaca.

The Spaniards commissioned the city’s design to one of the best town planners of the Empire, Alonso Garcia Bravo, architect of Mexico City and Veracruz. Garcia Bravo laid out the city with cord. He began with the creation of a Plaza Central or Zócalo (Square), oriented by the cardinal points, and established according to a simple symbology: A Cathedral was built on one side of the square (over the Aztec’s place for their dead), on the other side, all municipal buildings, the basis for civil power. Thus, it was thought, the square would irradiate throughout the city, the balance between the terrestrial and the sacred, the Church and the civil power.

Source: Oaxaca's Tourist Guide